Rebellion in Lebanon – It is necessary to build the Party of the Proletarian Revolution

Rebellion in Lebanon

It is necessary to build the Party of the Proletarian Revolution

Masses, 32^th year, n. 616 – August 16, 2020.

On August 4, the Lebanese capital, Beirut, was hit by a massive explosion from a warehouse containing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, reducing port facilities and much of the city center to rubble. There were 160 deaths and 6,000 injuries. In the explosion, 80% of the grain stocks expected for this year were also lost.

The event would be nothing more than a tragic accident, if it did not come to the fore that, a month earlier, a report from the General Directorate of State Security issued numerous warnings about the danger of ammonium nitrate, stored in the port since 2013. The report also exposed the endemic corruption of the ethnic and religious factions (Sunni, Shiite, Catholic and Islamic) that control the state apparatus. The administration of the largest and main port in Lebanon (approximately 75% of imports enter the country by sea) is known as “The cave of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, for its discretionary management and corruption, which involve import and export permits.

On August 5, massive street demonstrations broke out, demanding the government’s resignation “en bloc”, accusing it of being responsible for the tragedy. Under new conditions, the workers’ and popular uprising resumed, which led to the overthrow of the prime minister, Saad Hariri, on October 29, 2019, powerless to provide an effective solution to the pressing needs of the exploited population.

It so happens that the Hariri government implemented a plan of budgetary adjustments, an increase in regressive taxes, violent social counter-reforms, and that further subjected Lebanon to imperialist financial parasitism. The measures spurred the rapid destruction of Lebanese purchasing power, increased unemployment, and projected misery and poverty on a large scale.

Such measures were presented as the only way to solve the serious economic crisis. But the masses fighting the attacks prevented Hariri from implementing his anti-popular and anti-national program. Powerless, he resigned from office. It is under these conditions that Hassan Diab was elected prime minister. But his election did not alter the physiological relations within the state apparatus, nor did he alter the anti-popular and anti-national orientation of the offensive of the imperialist and national bourgeoisie.

Diab inherited a convulsive situation and was faced with the unexpected pandemic of Covid-19, which further aggravated the picture of economic and social breakdown. In April, half of the 4.5 million inhabitants fell below the poverty line, prices of basic products increased by 60%, 200 thousand workers lost their jobs (unemployment reached 35%), more than a thousand shops and companies closed, as well as the public health crisis was potentiated, and the parasitism of the capitalist minority, which demanded an increase in the transfer of public funds to their pockets, opened wide. Such conditions sank Lebanon, a failed country, which imports 80% of the products it consumes, as well as supporting 1.5 million Syrian refugees and 400,000 Palestinians. These charges bleed the national treasury, already committed to the imperialist plundering of public debt, which makes up 170% of GDP.

The masses proved by experience that the election of Diab did not alter the trends of economic, social and political breakdown. The new government was committed to maintaining the economic policy of its predecessor, although it had proposed to postpone the implementation of counter-reforms and negotiations with the IMF. Certainly, it was part of the calculations of the Lebanese feudal-bourgeois fractions that the exchange of one bourgeois government for another, together with the impasse in negotiations with the IMF, would allow to temporarily cool the class struggle and guarantee bourgeois governance.

However, the worsening economic crisis – combined with the devastating effects on the masses’ jobs, wages and living conditions by the pandemic – prevented the mass struggle from being definitively aborted. The explosion and its consequences exposed the masses that nothing had changed since the fall of Hariri. Revolted, they rose in struggle and faced brutal repression. The resumption of the uprising alerted the government to the danger of the masses breaking definitively with the bourgeois regime. It is under these conditions that Diab resigned as prime minister, along with 30 of his ministers, and early elections were called.

What is essential is that, on the basis of this convulsive course of the political crisis, there is the economic breakdown and the violent fall in the living conditions of the masses. The advance of the majority’s poverty and misery clashes with the gigantic concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority.

The call for early elections seeks to create an outlet for the explosion of these social contradictions. But the electoral maneuver will not dissolve the convulsive situation. This is what can be observed with the maneuvers of imperialism to use tragedy to condition “humanitarian aid” to the approval of counter-reforms dictated by the IMF. Emanuel Macron, president of France, arrived in Beirut two days after the explosion. Among the rubble, he offered to organize international aid personally, but with the proviso that the reforms aborted by the fall of Hariri should be imposed immediately. So that the “reconstruction of Lebanon”, under the euphemism of “humanitarian aid”, will be paid for by the oppressed masses through labor, social security and fiscal counter-reforms.

It is good to remember that Lebanon is a country in permanent dispute between the Sunni and Shiite Arab fractions. The “peaceful” coexistence was only possible as long as the world economy and the agreements for sharing territories and areas of influence made it possible to accommodate the shocks. The 2008 crisis, with the breakdown of the economy, spurred the struggle between the dominant fractions of the feudal-bourgeoisie in the Middle East. The worsening regional war clashes between Israel and Palestine, Hezbolah (paramilitary organization dominant in Lebanon) and Syria, on the one side; as well as the interventionist threats from Sunni countries against Iran (Shiite), on the other, expose the shadow of the civil war that devastated the country for 15 years, and which is projected in the current political situation. Over these factions, in permanent dispute, the imperialist monopoly capital hangs, which aims to restore the links of their domination, enhancing interventionism over the region’s semi-colonies.

Such is the most general framework in which the masses resume their struggle in defense of their living conditions. The situation, therefore, requires that the exploited Lebanese take a leap in their independent political organization, and struggle to transform the social strength of the workers’ and popular uprising into a movement capable of imposing the country’s self-determination, and opening the way for the proletariat’s struggle for power.

The conditions are favorable for the class-conscious vanguard to place itself as constituting a Trotskyist Marxist-Leninist party. This is the strategic task that arises in the midst of the mass struggle. In Brazil, we support the Lebanese people’s struggle for their liberation from the fractions of power that express the interests of the feudal-bourgeoisie, and of colonial imperialism.